The latest volume in the Michigan Modern Dramatists series offers an authoritative but accessible look at Harold Pinter, one of the greatest and most influential postwar British playwrights and author of classic works such as The Birthday Party and The Homecoming. Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 for his remarkable body of work and plays that "uncover the precipice under everyday prattle and force entry into oppression's closed rooms."

Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power focuses on the playwright's continuously innovative experiments in...

Paula Vogel's plays, including the Pulitzer-prizewinning How I Learned to Drive, initiate a conversation with contemporary culture, staging vexed issues like domestic violence, pornography, and AIDS. She does not write "about" these concerns, but instead examines how they have become framed as "issues-"-as sensationalized topics-focusing on the histories and discourses that have defined them and the bodies that bear their meanings. Mobilizing campy humor, keen insight, and nonlinear structure, her plays defamiliarize the identities and issues that have been fixed as "just the way...

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) wrote topical, humorous plays addressing relationships among women and their families, taking the temperature of social moments from the 1960s onwards. This volume provides a critical introduction and a feminist reappraisal of the significant plays of one of the most famous contemporary American women playwrights.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) wrote topical, humorous plays addressing relationships among women and their families, taking the temperature of social moments from the 1960s onwards. This volume provides a critical introduction and a feminist reappraisal of the significant plays of one of the most famous contemporary American women playwrights.